Elizabeth Grimm Arsenault, How the Gloves Came Off: Lawyers, Policy Makers, and Norms in the Debate on Torture (Columbia University Press, 2017, viii + 254 pp, £30.00) ISBN 9780231180788 (hb) 9,780,231,543,255 (ebk)

This contribution argues for the recognition of digital integrity as a human right, either as a right on its own or as an interpretative principle for related rights. The right to digital integrity represents a legal norm that crystallizes a certain vision of the individual, as well as the protections that he/she ought to be afforded in a world where digital technologies are omnipresent and pervasive. The main function which digital integrity would fulfil as a human right is a consistency-providing function between the protection of human dignity, the protection of freedom and the protection of privacy. Digital integrity is a concretization of the protection of human dignity in terms of the specific threats that are posed by digital technologies. It serves to promote a substantial definition of what freedom should be about and how this freedom relates to the protection of privacy in informational matters. This contribution illustrates this claim by outlining a republican view of digital integrity and exemplifying its impact on related rights.

This article focuses on a specific standard by which the right to a fair trial is interpreted in the context of the right to legal assistance and the right to examine witnesses under Article 6 ECHR, the standard of overall fairness. The first section argues that the standard of overall fairness undermines the rule of law and represents a problematic conception of the right to a fair trial. The second section links overall fairness to the Court’s wider methodological approach to adjudication, namely ad hoc balancing, and establishes that ad hoc balancing is vulnerable to similar critiques. The third section advocates for a legal doctrine which rejects the theoretical assumptions of balancing and sets the basis for a reconceptualisation of the European Court of Human Rights’ approach to methodology and to the grant of remedies.

Anti-libidinal interventions (ALIs) are used in several jurisdictions to reduce male sex offenders’ libido. One common objection to these interventions holds that when offenders are either required to undergo them or offered to undergo them as an alternative to continued incarceration, ALIs violate recipients’ human rights. In this article, I examine this objection, which I call the human rights objection to ALIs, in relation to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Specifically, I examine the objection to ALIs in relation to Articles 3, 8 and 12 ECHR, which are the rights proponents of the human rights objection have identified as most relevant. I argue that the human rights objection in its current form fails to establish that ALIs violate recipients’ ECHR rights in respect of all these Articles.